In 1987 and 1988 Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler, together with the author Wolfgang Kil, made two journeys to Lisbon to photograph and describe the city and its people for a book project of the Leipzig Brockhaus Verlag. For the photographers, already well-known in the GDR at the time, it was a rare opportunity to cast a glance beyond the Iron Curtain. But the book planned for 1989 could not appear, and shared the fate of a vanishing world.